Growth-oriented local businesses and the city of Vancouver
initiated efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to address the
city's air pollution problem. Despite generally improving dustfall
measurements due to changing fuel use, industrial relocation, and steady
city management of the issue, the coalition of air-quality reformers did
not obtain broader regional or provincial government support until the
late 1960s. Rather, public interventions prompted the provincial
government to acknowledge air pollution as a formal political issue, and
finally to take action. This article provides an account of air
pollution in Vancouver and British Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s,
highlighting the roles of social and economic groups and their
interactions with political structures.

On a mild day in late May 1969, dozens of journalists piled into a
chartered DC-8 to fly over Howe Sound, the southeast coast of Vancouver
Island, and Greater Vancouver. They were looking for signs of pollution
and environmental degradation. It was not hard to find. Vancouver
Province columnist Lome Parton described scarred hills from clear-cut
logging, miles of "yellow crud" in the coastal waters,
"plumes of acrid effluent pouring up and over green valleys from
the stacks of pulp mills," and, approaching Vancouver from the
southwest, "the city swathed in a brown, frightening halo of
smog." (1)

The journalists were not alone in observing pollution and the
deterioration of nature all about. The late 1960s saw the beginning of
the modern environmental movement across most Western countries. In
Vancouver, the media were filled with reporting, opinions, and images
reflecting local and global pollution, its consequences and possible
solutions. It was not unusual for residents to demonstrate during these
years against bad air quality associated with such emission sources as
bulk ship-loading facilities and oil refineries. Many residents spoke at
local government council meetings, a few even bringing buckets of coal
or mucky water in theatrical show-and-tell displays. Some attended
anti-pollution meetings organized by newly formed environmental groups
or older ones that expanded their focus to include the more current
clean air and water concerns. One new organization was the Society for
Pollution and Environmental Control, or SPEC. Its membership spread
rapidly across all regions of British Columbia only months after its
formation. In the fervour of the time, British Columbia's Premier
W.A.C. Bennett declared the environment and pollution control to be the
top priority of the election that he called for the autumn of 1969. A
few days after the election call, Natural Resources Minister Ray
Williston announced the province's first credible air pollution
policy.

The wave of heightened environmental sensibility and activism of
the late 1960s, however, was also the culmination of growing public,
organizational, and governmental concern, dating, in Vancouver at least,
from the early 1950s. The Vancouver Air Pollution Control Society
(APCS), formed in 1952, established a reputation across North America by
producing and distributing two popular documentary films on the topic.
(2) In the 1950s, major newspapers regularly covered air pollution
stories, while residents voiced complaints and sometimes picketed
offending industrial plants. The annual British Columbia Natural
Resources Conference organized an expert panel discussion on air
pollution in 1954. The city of Vancouver had a very limited by-law
covering air pollution dating from the 1920s, which it replaced with a
more detailed regulation in 1955. Public significance of air pollution
started to crest as a major theme of the modern environmental wave at
the end of the 1960s. But the roots of the air pollution issue in the
two preceding decades in Vancouver bear further exploration.

This article examines how air pollution transformed from a
tolerated background nuisance in people's lives to an important
public and political problem from the late 1940s through the late 1960s.
(3) The geographical focus is on the city of Vancouver, with some other
municipalities and the government of British Columbia playing important
roles as well. The public, however, proved to be a major player
affecting the timing and the stringency of air-pollution policies in
Vancouver and British Columbia. This article explores how the owners and
operators of industrial firms and businesses and the public at large
interacted with state structures in attempting to resolve, or at least
manage, this social problem. Both the neglect and the management of
social problems by the state tell us something about its nature in
capitalist society.

The conceptual starting point of this article is that the state in
Western societies is constrained by its capitalist and democratic
structures. I describe a historical example of the state's
management of environmental conflict, responding to the demands for
support of the interests of a narrow cohort of corporation and business
owners while seeking popular legitimation. As described below, there are
complexities, including differences of interests within the industrial
and business community and between how municipal and provincial
governments sought to manage the conflicts and congruences between the
capitalist and democratic imperatives. As well, the story of the
management of air pollution in British Columbia can be understood only
by introducing the influences of bureaucratic, academic, and other
professional elites. As such, this article attempts to illustrate a
central thesis of Robert Alford and Roger Friedland that an
"adequate theory of the state" must incorporate three levels
of analysis: the class perspective of society, the pluralist perspective
of individuals and groups, and the managerial perspective of
organizational elites. (4)

The specific content of this article falls into the environmental
literature of urban nuisances, specifically that associated with the
analyses of George Gonzalez for the United States and Owen Temby for
Canada. (5) This research shows that locally oriented economic elites
have most frequently initiated the politicization of local air or
nuisance problems. Vancouver too follows this model, but in combination
with the city of Vancouver staff and politicians. The interests of
locally oriented economic and professional elites, the city of
Vancouver, and the public were aligned on air pollution, leading to
vigorous local activism and substantive policy implementation. However,
Vancouver's example also shows that the salience of air quality as
a public issue increased during this study, regardless of these local
efforts, partly because of provincial failure to act. This article thus
illustrates a complex instance of Temby's four-scenario
classification of urban political contestations and policy outcomes: a
strong local response to air pollution was combined with provincial
inaction to produce a de facto "failed compromise" over
several decades. (6)

There must be an early distinction between public and political
issues in that certain public issues are not formally taken up
politically. Although a public issue may be political because it is
openly discussed in society, sometimes the state Ignores subsets of
these issues. Such issues are reflected in the agenda-setting authority
of the state in Lukes's analysis of the "two-dimensional
level" of power: (7) the "un-politics" of air pollution
in Crenson's analysis. (8) This distinction is necessary in a
history of air pollution policies in Vancouver and British Columbia,
since the provincial government did not begin to address the issue,
albeit ineffectively, until the early 1960s, despite Vancouver's
much earlier air pollution policy and pollution-monitoring and
anti-smoke staff dating from the late 1940s. Also the APCS, newspapers,
and the public debated and demonstrated against air pollution from the
early 1950s. Through the 1950s and 1960s there was a growing public call
for air pollution to be dealt with by political entities with more scope
than individual municipalities, whether regional groupings of local
governments or the provincial government. Therefore, while in Vancouver
the public and formal political sides of the issue largely overlapped,
air pollution emerged as an acknowledged political issue in the province
years later. Not until 1966 did the province issue a policy statement,
although it was not effectively implemented. The policy that was
ultimately put into place was announced only in 1969. A central question
explored in this article is why provincial and city of Vancouver
responses to air pollution were so different.

The power and rights inherent in private ownership of productive
resources in liberal capitalist societies provide an entrance point to
understanding how a social ill, emanating largely from relatively few
sources, can be disposed onto non-consenting city or town residents. The
owners of industrial facilities have profit and competitive interests in
avoiding as many production costs as possible, whether in wages or
pollution controls. Crenson, for example, describes how the unequal
political influence of industries in two Indiana cities determined the
timeliness of air quality regulations. (9)

But a capitalist class interest in opposing air pollution policy is
not as simple as it might seem. Indeed, early sponsorship of anti-air
pollution policies in Vancouver and other North American cities
originated in a segment of this very class. Insight into this phenomenon
is provided by urban geographers John Logan and Harvey Molotch, who
characterize North American cities as "growth machines." (10)
They argue that "place entrepreneurs," often working together,
relentlessly promote capital investment in cities to increase property
values and associated rents. A key distinction that they draw is between
economic interests that are tied to local sales, such as real estate and
city newspapers (which depend on the demographic and economic attributes
of their locale for financial gain) and corporate concerns whose
products are shipped more widely. These latter industrialists have
relatively less commitment to economic growth in their own geographic
production area. They can also shift, or threaten to shift, production
or investment to new areas in response to changing regulatory and market
circumstances.

George Gonzalez extends this analysis by arguing that more locally
bound economic concerns, including those of professionals and market
retailors, have an interest in reducing air pollution. He views poor air
quality as a deterrent to population growth, densification, and
investment in cities that drive increased rents, sales, and the need for
professional services. Some local industries are also directly affected
by air pollution, such as tourism, and, if smoke and smog pollution are
particularly bad, air transportation. (11) Location-bound businesses and
professional service-providers usually produce little air pollution
themselves and thus incur minor or no costs in its management. More
externally oriented industrial firms, however, are usually opposed to
the costs that can result from air management. (12) Gonzalez notes many
examples in the United States, where local interests have made air
pollution a public concern. Temby applies such analysis to Toronto,
Sudbury, and Montreal in the early and mid-twentieth century. (13)

However, Gonzalez makes the "local growth coalition" the
driving force of air quality initiatives in American cities and does not
agree that public concerns have significant influence in the development
of air pollution abatement policies. In Vancouver, although such a
coalition played a leading and highly visible role, it was crucially
supplemented by other players. For example, the city of Vancouver,
including local medical health officers, helped constitute and advise
the APCS. These combined forces drove Vancouver's air pollution
policies, but at the provincial level, they proved largely ineffectual.
Departing from the analysis of Gonzalez, this history argues that the
public's interventions at crucial points carried air pollution onto
the provincial political agenda and prompted key policy responses.

At a more general level of analysis, critical systems theories
provide other useful insights into pollution (and other social)
problems. This type of theory describes Interdependent, but partially
autonomous, relationships of political, economic, and social subsystems.
These theories emphasize the role of and constraints on the state within
capitalist-democratic societies. As indicated above, economic power is
concentrated in the hands of private owners who can externalize or
socialize costs of production, such as pollution. One key imperative for
the state is to protect accumulative private profit, which provides
vital taxation revenue streams to the state. But the state is also
embedded In democratic society. The state requires public legitimation,
and governments specifically require electoral support from the public.
Mitigating social costs, such as pollution, that are externalized by the
privately controlled economic system is a key legitimation function.
Some systems theorists such as Claus Offe emphasize the inherent
contradictions in the dual roles of accumulation support and public
legitimation. (14) These conflicting processes, in his analysis, cannot
be fundamentally resolved, but only managed In fragmentary ways.
Increased production, for example, increases air pollution, which is a
social cost to the public, but brings in tax revenue to the state. The
financial costs of air pollution control undermine the accumulative
process and state revenues, but this remediation Is necessary for social
harmony.

At least three potential state responses are identified in systems
literature to these unresolvable problems: issue displacement to other
organizations; development of uncoordinated and contradictory reactions
within the political subsystem; and insistence that problems are
technical rather than political. (15) Each of these responses is
represented in this history as described below. However, as insightful
as systems theories are, they have been criticized for underplaying or
lacking explanations for change, contingency, and agency In history,
while emphasizing the importance of long-lasting societal structures.
(16) Vancouver's air pollution history demonstrates that public
Interventions proved to be crucial in shaping specific points of
political and policy change, particularly at the provincial governmental
level.

Making Vancouver's Air Pollution a Public Issue

In 1960 the Vancouver Province described a landscape a decade
previously where the "sun was lost behind a blanket of black
smoke" blasting out of industrial stacks from sawmills ringing
False Creek and from coal-fired locomotives shunting cars at the
Canadian Pacific marshalling yards. (17) Grime and dust were evident on
windows, patios, and laundry hung out to dry. The chair of the Vancouver
Metropolitan Community Planning Association told Vancouver's
Electric Club In 1953, perhaps with some exaggeration, "Without air
currents to scatter the tons of smoke, ash and gases produced weekly by
the average industrial plant, people would gasp for breath and die
within five to ten hours." (18) Oil refineries and metal foundries
added their effluent to the mix. Pollutants came from cars, trucks,
buses, ships, and trains, from house chimneys in the winter and backyard
rubbish fires, and from commercial incinerators and municipal garbage
burning. In the fall, haze often covered Vancouver from the burning of
wood slash in forestry operations on the North Shore mountains and
around Howe Sound.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, air pollution
was typically regarded as a nuisance in North American cities. David
Stradling describes early efforts to improve air quality in mid-western
and eastern American cities that were initially motivated by concerns
about health, beauty, and cleanliness, and then by increasing focus on
efficiency and economic losses. (19) But these efforts had limited
success. By the end of the Second World War it was well recognized that
acutely bad air could kill, as was regularly referenced in Vancouver
newspapers, in places such as Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948, and London
in 1952. (20) But the typical smoky conditions in big cities and large
industrial towns were most often treated as unfortunate but tolerable
impairment to the enjoyment of life. Vancouver had a nuisance by-law
dating from 1923 that restricted the density of smoke from industrial
chimneys, but only for eleven minutes of any fifteen-minute period. A
more general by-law in Richmond made the "fouling or contaminating
the atmosphere" with "smoke, dust, effluvia, cinders, soot,
charred sawdust or fumes" a municipal offence. (21) A
consultants' report in 1945 recommended stronger smoke regulations
to improve the "character and tone" of downtown Vancouver.
(22) By 1948 Vancouver had a few smoke inspection, engineering, and
medical health staff to administer its early by-law. In 1949 Vancouver
City staff began measuring dust and soot falling to the ground. But,
despite these early efforts, nuisance by-laws were too general help much
in combating air pollution. Who could really tell if a factory was
fouling the atmosphere, or if it was simply the inevitable emissions of
a city that wanted to reap the employment and revenue benefits of
industrialization?

A public issue requires a collective response. Whether an issue
remains private or public Is a matter of institutions, values, and
history--it is a socially contingent question, not a natural one. Air
pollution became a public issue in Vancouver and British Columbia in the
1950s despite arguments for it to remain a private one. Some in the
business community and in local government said that pollution was
Inevitable in modern industrial-consumerist society. (23) An inescapable
naturalized condition is not a likely candidate to become a publicly
political Issue. In 1967 British Columbia Attorney General Robert Bonner
argued for air pollution to remain a private issue because, in his view,
the best remedial action was a lawsuit launched by an injured party
against the source of the pollution. (24) This decentralized, common law
approach was predicated on clearly defined procedures and rights between
theoretically equal parties able to reach individual case solutions in
front of a referee judge. The ineffectiveness of pre-1950 by-laws in
Vancouver and other municipalities lent themselves to this common law
approach, which was used with some success. However, most judged that
essentially private remedies for the harms of air pollution as much too
limiting.

One of the earliest organized responses to air pollution in
Vancouver that can be found in the public record was the formation of
the Air Pollution Control Society, or APCS, in 1952. (25) The APCS was
an outgrowth of a public affairs committee of the Kiwanis Club in
Vancouver, which in the 1940s had undertaken discussion and studies of
the city's air quality. (26) Kiwanis, like other service clubs,
appealed to local businessmen and professionals who wished to increase
their commercial contacts and promote local community infrastructure and
services. These clubs are ideologically associated with promoting the
growth of cities and towns, or "boosting" the local economy.
It is interesting to note that in 1950 the Vancouver Kiwanis Club could
not maintain the interest of another advisory committee on air pollution
to the city of Vancouver. This direct forerunner of the APCS, largely
composed of representatives of large, heavily polluting industries,
rarely met and was quickly disbanded. The chief directors of the
succeeding advisory committee, the APCS, spoke for a different category
of business. They came from the professional service industries, such as
engineering, insurance, and accounting. These were professions that had
direct economic interests in the market opportunities of a growing city
population and economy. A key thing to note is that the APCS was not a
public grassroots organization, but the creation of local business
interests, who played little if any role in emitting pollutants, and the
city of Vancouver.

The APCS provided speakers to other civil society association
meetings, wrote brochures, and produced documentary films, such as
Airborne Garbage and The First Mile Up, that were widely requested for
viewing by groups around the Lower Mainland and cities around North
America. The organization's early activities involved providing
information on pollution and encouraging mitigation by local
governments, civil groups, and individuals at venues such as the Pacific
National Exhibition. Through the 1950s and early 1960s the APCS
attempted to bring Lower Mainland regional municipalities together for
joint air quality management and to lobby the provincial government.

The interests of industries and businesses highly dependent on
local economic conditions and those with a broader market diverged on
air pollution. George Gonzales has provided compelling evidence from a
variety of American cities that the geographically constrained
businesses and professionals were instrumental in initiating demands for
air quality regulations. (27) Less attached industrial firms, however,
are usually opposed to the significant costs that can result from air
management. (28) This urban pattern is consistent with the evidence of
who tangibly supported anti-air pollution efforts in Vancouver. The
origins of Kiwanis and the local business-oriented membership of the
APCS fit into a North American pattern of initial and continuing support
for reducing air pollution that seems largely motivated by
location-based economic interests.

Vancouver's two major daily newspapers--the Province and the
Sun--also played large roles in making air pollution an important public
issue. A 1950 article in the Province indicated that Vancouver, like Los
Angeles, had a smog problem. Accompanied by a picture of black smoke
from a factory stack and indicating that not all industrial sites had
complied with Vancouver's by-law, the article focused mainly on how
to improve coal-burning efficiency in home heating appliances. (29) In
March 1955 the Province ran a four-part series whose key message was
that "one of the most vital problems facing Vancouver today, from
health, economic and aesthetic standpoints, is the pall of smoke which
constantly hangs over the city." (30) The Province editorials often
used emotive language, such as describing air pollution as an
"active killer," "nauseating," a "deadly
witches' broth," a danger "worse than atomic bomb
radiation," and a "poison." (31) A regular editorial
theme in the Province's coverage was dismay at public apathy on the
issue. (32) The Vancouver Sun was slower to cover and editorialize about
air pollution, but by the mid-1950s it too began regular coverage. Arnie
Myers, a Sun medical writer, wrote a highly praised weeklong series in
1965 covering the sources, impacts, and controls available for water and
air pollution. High demand for reprints prompted the Sun to republish
the articles in a booklet.

While the newspapers' coverage of air pollution was sincere
and publicly beneficial in the fight for cleaner air, this engagement
also demonstrated that location-based business owners played a large
role in initiating and sustaining air pollution as a public issue in
Vancouver. The revenues of privately owned newspapers depended heavily
on copy and advertising sales. Growth in these revenue sources were
driven in turn by increases in population and the income and competition
generated by the local business economy. To the extent that air
pollution threatened this growth, it was also a direct threat to this
business. Newspapers in other heavily polluted cities, such as Los
Angeles, St. Louis, and Toronto, also played significant roles in their
battles with air pollution. (33)

Other industries closely tied to their specific location in
Vancouver also entered the air pollution fight. For some of them, air
pollution entailed direct costs and risks to their operations, apart
from constraints it might impose on general market growth. For example,
cleaning grime from downtown Vancouver buildings was estimated in 1955
to cost up to $750,000 annually. (34) Representatives of the air
transportation industry in Vancouver were early complainants about the
impact of air pollution on visibility. The BC Aviation Council Air
Pollution Committee--a mix of municipal and aviation industry
representatives--was formed in the 1960s to publicize both the risks
involved and the cost of delays in take-offs and landings at the
Vancouver International Airport due to smoke-influenced hazy conditions.
(35) The importance of the tourism industry to Vancouver and British
Columbia grew over the 1950s and 1960s, as did its interventions on the
effects of air pollution. As well, the Associated Boards of Trade of the
Fraser Valley and the Lower Mainland, representing mainly locally
marketing businesses, called on municipalities in 1959 to tighten air
pollution by-laws and considered lobbying the provincial government for
action. (36) This support is consistent with that reported in a survey
from the 1960s of fifty-one American cities, which found that local
Chambers of Commerce, newspapers, and local government administrators
and agencies were disproportionately in favour of air pollution control.
(37)

The City of Vancouver and Public Health Officials Fight Pollution

However, the support of location-bound business for air pollution
policies was supplemented by public health staff, who also played a
significant role in Vancouver's air quality. These professionals,
working closely with Greater Vancouver cities, but reporting within the
hierarchy of the provincial Ministry of Health, also had a stake in
making air pollution a public issue in the 1950s and 1960s. The BC
Health Act provided general authority to the province, allowing it to
take steps to prevent or abate the health impacts of pollution. But the
act was used mainly to control the introduction of sewage into rivers
and lakes. Municipal by-laws were the main vehicle used by public health
staff to improve air quality. The medical health officer of Vancouver
became an ex-officio member of the APCS advisory board in 1952, while
health and other Vancouver professionals provided guidance over the next
decade. Public health staff, including medical researchers at the
University of British Columbia, carried out early air pollution health
impact studies, worked closely with regional governments in monitoring
and reporting air pollution, and were a loud voice for control measures
throughout the postwar decades. Other Vancouver officials also provided
key support in writing the constitution of the APCS. Until the late
1960s Vancouver politicians continued to provide annual operating grants
that were critical to its survival. (38) The involvement of all these
professionals, whose motivating interest was public health and community
well-being, complicates any attempt to make location-bound economic
interests the sole source of the early anti-pollution efforts.

The city of Vancouver replaced Its general smoke by-law in late
1955 with a more specific air pollution control regulation, but it was
still focused on visible smoke. Earlier, city officials had complained
that backyard burning of garbage and garden clippings were not covered
under the old by-law. (39) In late 1953 Vancouver's chief medical
officer visited Pittsburgh to study its anti-smoke efforts, and he was
highly impressed with the public and industry support it received for
its strong anti-smoke by-law. (40) Next year, Vancouver hired a
consultants' group from Chicago to advise on air pollution
measures. The 1955 by-law required a permit to install and operate of
any large fuel-burning appliances and associated pollution control
equipment. The smoke from any chimney or open fire could not be thicker
than the second level of opacity of a Ringelmann chart for more than six
minutes of any hour. Developed in the late nineteenth century, the
Ringelmann chart provided an observer with six ink-modelled levels of
smoke density, ranging from perfectly clear to completely black, to
judge smoke densities. Vancouver also applied a more rigorous weight-
and volume-based prohibition on particle emissions, but it depended on
equipment that was not usually in use to measure "dust, fume, solid
or liquid particles." (41)

The Canadian Manufacturers Association (CMA), representing mainly
larger industrial interests, opposed the 1955 Vancouver by-law. (42) A
BC representative, Robert McDonell, claimed that the by-law would drive
some metal foundries out of business by imposing average control costs
of $10,000 to $15,000 per firm. (43) In response Vancouver gave the
foundries an extra eighteen months to comply, and later exempted them
completely. However, still feuding at a public conference in early 1958,
McDonell, in a revealing choice of words, said that the air pollution
controls imposed a "damaging amount of money" on business,
which he now estimated generally at $40,000 per firm. He added a common
corporate complaint that home heating and cars were exempt under the
by-law. Another speaker at the conference added that the by-law
increased business capital costs but provided no financial return. (44)
Two points emerge from the brief newspaper reporting on this conference.
First, the CMA did not oppose the by-law completely--McDonell said that
it was "adequate" as far as it went. Even corporate interests
that were hurt by regulation recognized limits to public and political
acceptance of pollution impacts and acceded to some mitigation. The
strategy appeared to involve exerting corporate influence on the
stringency of pollution control and the associated financial costs,
while still being able to point out that pollution was being managed.
Emphasizing that the singular interest of business was profit, speakers
tried to shift the focus of pollution harms to that of pollution control
costs and away from pollution's physical impacts. Virtually all
reports of pollution control in the business pages of Vancouver's
newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s trumpeted the financial costs of
pollution control-large in absolute dollars, but relatively small when
scaled by total capital or operating costs. The message was not
fundamental opposition to pollution controls, but rather that
corporations were good "citizens," as measured by their narrow
yardsticks of money spent. The second point was that Vancouver's
metal foundries were mainly smaller businesses tied to the local market,
not the Canadian or export market. The idea that locally marketing
businesses tended to support air pollution control is well supported but
needs to be tempered by instances of opposition from industries that
were themselves significant sources of pollution.

There seem to be incongruities in Vancouver's early air
pollution advocacy and regulation. First, Vancouver had the legislative
tools to deal with pollution, as it showed in 1955 and earlier. It was
advocating for pollution control via the APCS, while simultaneously
acting on its own regulatory capacity to deal with the issue. But
government action was constrained by social and economic groups opposed
to some policies, as indicated in the case of the CMA. Building a
broader social support base for controversial action helps explain
Vancouver's fostering of an advocacy organization such as the APCS.
Another reason for the advocacy support was that Vancouver needed help
from other municipalities and the provincial government. Vancouver could
not produce its own clean air while smoke and smells continued to blow
in from surrounding areas. In addition, politicians were afraid that a
patchwork of local government air pollution approaches would allow
companies to move facilities to areas with the lowest control costs.
Beyond striving for the cooperation of surrounding local governments,
the APCS and newspapers also advocated for comprehensive provincial
legislation. Such legislation would not only cover all British Columbia,
incorporated or not, but also bring stronger government financial
resources to bear on the problem.

A second incongruity in Vancouver's support for advocacy was
that the APCS--like the newspapers--consistently urged greater public
outrage over air pollution. It expressed frustration at residents'
seeming passive acceptance of air quality. A superficial reading might
see inconsistency in the government representing public interests, but
then trying to stimulate those latent Interests when they do not seem to
be strongly expressed. A strictly pluralist understanding of government
would have difficulty with Vancouver's stance. A way out of this
inconsistency is to recognize again Vancouver's own property tax
revenue interests, which depended on the financial vibrancy of local
businesses and economic growth in general. To the extent that cleaner
air benefitted this growth, there was also a direct municipal financial
interest In it. A fundamental Insight into public "Issueness"
is offered by E.E. Schattschneider, who argues that the weaker parties
in a conflict often try to increase their strength by socializing the
problem that lies behind the clash. (45) By striving to increase the
number of people willing to act on pollution, the city of Vancouver, the
APCS, and location-bound businesses were attempting to build support for
potentially controversial actions against powerful industrialists and an
indifferent provincial government.

But the city of Vancouver was motivated not only by a perceived
threat to its property tax revenues in engaging in a fight against air
pollution. Just as medical health professionals were interested In
improving the conditions of public health, Vancouver staff and
politicians had the same non-mediated public interest, in addition to
their more indirect, perhaps less obvious, financial motivations. As
outlined in the introduction, this article assumes the state in Western
capitalist societies has two fundamental functions. The first is to
support capital accumulation in the private market, such as by
subsidizing physical infrastructure and resource costs and by providing
regulatory constraints on unbridled competition in the market. The
second is to seek legitimacy for the political and economic order by
mitigating some negative effects associated with private ownership and
markets, such as pollution (and unemployment, income, social and gender
inequalities, and so on). The work of the city and its public health
professionals in the 1950s and 1960s reflected this second function, as
much as it reflected its own taxation interests and the profit focus of
the location-bound business community. Unless one takes an inflexible
instrumentalist view of the state as controlled essentially by
capitalist interests, it is possible to see independence in the role of
city staff, politicians, and public health professionals. Crucially, as
Indicated above, the business community was divided on air pollution
control. The extent to which the city of Vancouver succeeded in
rebalancing the financial and physical costs of air pollution must be
seen in an empirical historical light, as informed by theories of the
state and the economy. Not only did Vancouver adjudicate the split
interests of location and non-location-bound business Interests, but
also those between the public, bearing the impacts of pollution, and
industry and other sources of pollution, bearing some of the financial
cost of air pollution control. Certainly more than only a specific
business interest in Vancouver raised air pollution as a public issue.

However, the campaign for a Greater Vancouver regional pollution
authority, extending beyond the bounds of the city of Vancouver, was not
successful in the 1950s, nor through most of the 1960s. Other large,
dirty cities, such as Los Angeles and Toronto, had taken a metropolitan
approach to drifting air pollutants that obviously did not respect
political boundaries. The Chicago consultants had recommended just this
step to Vancouver in 1954. (46) But exploratory meetings between Lower
Mainland municipalities in 1955 and 1957 on joint action on air
pollution led nowhere. The APCS hosted two further such meetings in 1963
attempting again to foster a regional air pollution authority. Although
generally supportive, representatives of the local governments decided
to lobby the British Columbia government for a provincial approach. In
December of that year the Union of BC Municipalities approached Victoria
to include air emissions in the BC Pollution Control Act, but the
Bennett administration did nothing. (47)

The Public Response

As indicated above, public apathy on air quality and pollution was
the subject of much editorializing in newspapers and by health
professionals. But there were many instances of public protest. For
example, in 1953 a local ratepayers' association and a
veterans' group that had been provided with housing in north
Richmond near the Vancouver Rendering Company, organized street
demonstrations and pickets against the meat plant. Despite efforts of
the BC Research Council to reduce the smells and pollutants, these
protests helped to close the facility. (48) While the record of letters
of complaint, telephone logs, and political or administrative discussion
of public reactions is patchy, clues suggest that the public was not as
quiescent as elite opinion would have it. Complaints were regularly made
to the city of Vancouver. In 1956, the one year for which I have found a
number, 360 air quality complaints were submitted to the city. (49)
Vancouver relied on these complaints, In part, to help determine
priorities for an overbooked staff. An eye-stinging smog event starting
after business hours in January 1957 resulted in complaints and
questions pouring into BC Electric and newspaper phone lines. A reporter
described it as an "oily, onion-and-rubber-like smell" that
resulted in "smarting eyes, headaches and nausea," even as the
Burnaby health officer said there was little health risk in bad odours.
(50) If the professional air quality community tended to focus on
averages, trends and overall comparisons of air quality in Vancouver to
other cities, the broader public revealed itself more in reaction to
individual sources or episodes of pollution that had an immediate impact
on quality of life.

There were also more organized public reactions that involved
greater planning and effort. Evidence indicates that much of this
activism involved pollution sources in Vancouver suburbs and other
communities in British Columbia that had weak, poorly enforced, or no
municipal air pollution by-laws. For example, in November 1958 a
permanent injunction--ultimately unsuccessful--was sought by a couple
from Duncan against the BC Forest Products pulp mill in Crofton that was
producing offensive smells. (51) Paul Arens, owner of a popular
restaurant and motel in Victoria, launched a more successful suit
against a nearby BC Forest Products mill in 1965. (52) As well,
home-owners initiated challenges against property assessments that did
not account, it was argued, for market-based devaluations of financial
worth due to pollution impacts. (53) Ratepayer associations sometimes
sponsored pollution-based challenges to property tax assessments on
behalf of all homeowners in an area. Residents claimed victory when even
token reductions in assessed values were awarded, indicating the
importance of protests in political, not Individual financial, terms. A
sufficient number of residents protested the effects of bad air quality
during the 1950s to reflect general dissatisfaction with air quality
situation and willingness to act in certain situations. The charge of
indifference to the situation cannot be maintained.

However, early responses did tend to be individualistic. An
individual complaint to authorities can be understood as a natural
response when a negative public event is interpreted as episodic. But
when problematic impacts are ongoing, they form general conditions whose
attributes are anticipated and to which more coordinated responses can
be structured. Individual complaints are largely invisible to others who
experience the same issue and may be reacting in the same way. More
collective public responses to air pollution included challenges by the
ratepayer association, signed petitions, municipal council appearances
by groups, protest meetings, and street demonstrations. These tools of
protest were used in Vancouver and other parts of British Columbia
throughout my study period, but with increased frequency, starting from
the 1960s. They showed greater group planning and effort, compared to
individual complaints, lawsuits, or challenges to specific house tax
assessments. The coordination in response allowed individuals to opt
into a group effort at a much higher level of social and political
effectiveness than that of an individual complaint. Instead of the
individual's plea for redress or information, group action allowed
for a stronger, more widespread voice that demanded a policy response to
the ongoing characteristics of air quality.

Particularly important examples of these collective responses were
the south Vancouver/Richmond and Port Alberni protests of early to
mid-1960s. In 1961 residents in South Vancouver met with the Richmond
city council to protest the heavy fallout of soot from beehive burners
on Mitchell Island. Residents described quality-of-life impacts that
included decreased enjoyment of walks and backyard barbeques, damage to
house roofs and paint, and soiled carpets, drapes, and laundry. (54)
Richmond officials and politicians agreed that their by-law was being
broken by two sawmills, but that the expense for the companies to
correct the situation was large, and employment at the mills needed to
be considered. (55) In the face of a continuing problem and political
inaction, the south Vancouver residents formed an air pollution control
committee, which in 1963 raised $800 in small donations from hundreds of
households to support a filing for a permanent injunction in the BC
Supreme Court. Both mills settled out of court, agreeing to shut down
their beehive burners and send their waste wood to nearby pulp mills for
processing. (56)

The most sustained public protests over air pollution during the
early and mid-1960s took place on Vancouver Island in the twin valley
communities of Port Alberni and Alberni. These protests are significant
for Vancouver, since they were well covered by the city's
newspapers, showed the efficacy of organized public protest, and put
intense political pressure on the provincial government to act. The
location of the towns on a narrow Inlet between two mountain ranges led
to stagnant air conditions--air inversions--that trapped heavy smoke and
soot emissions from the Macmillan Bloedel Powell pulp complex. A
Vancouver Sun editorial noted the physical effects of the Port Alberni
air pollution on washed clothes, house paint, and cars--the company
provided a three-stall car wash facility free for residents of the
town--but the greater concern was potential cancer and bronchitis. (57)
At a protest meeting in January 1966 a worker said he had nothing
against the company--his job and wages were good--but he noted
sarcastically, "I like to breathe too." (58) A poignant,
silent march was held in early February to protest air emissions.
Photographs of some of the hundreds walking quietly, wearing soiled
clothes, and carrying pollution-damaged household goods appeared in
major newspapers. Also indicative of the level of the concern was a
petition to the provincial government demanding action on air pollution.
The final signatures totalled In the thousands--a significant portion of
the small twin-town population. The local pulp complex provided most of
the employment in the community. The marchers and the petition
signatories showed courage in opposing company financial interests.

The Port Alberni protesters also illustrate a consistent public
struggle over the meaning of bad air quality. This was a two-sided
argument about how to interpret or situate air pollution in public
thinking and discourse. One tendency was that of many provincial
politicians, industry spokesmen, and even a few health professionals
emphasizing the aesthetic and nuisance aspect of bad air: bad smells,
spoiled laundry efforts, and minor economic costs, but few serious
health effects. The other interpretive tendency of most health officers,
many, although not all, city officials, and the major newspapers was to
play up just these potential heart, lung, and psychological impacts of
air pollution. However, these elite interpretations did not affect the
public at large, at least not In the way intended by the proponents of
the different meanings of the pollution. The Port Alberni and Vancouver
protesters indicated that it was all the above: the nuisance and
economic effects and the frightening, if not specific potential health
impacts, were not carefully separated, but all tended to produce an
Intolerable quality of life. (59)

Community organizers from Port Alberni met in the spring of 1966
with Cabinet members in Victoria, receiving a promise of provincial
legislation. Although they would have to wait some years for a workable
policy response, the provincial government did start to engage by
putting out policy statements from the time of the South Vancouver and
Port Alberni protests, although none were Implemented. The APCS,
newspapers, local governments, and health professionals had been
advocating for a provincial response for years, without success.
Although It is impossible to definitively attribute the adoption of air
pollution as a formal provincial government political issue to such
public demonstrations, they surely played a significant role. Early
efforts to support air-quality initiatives by the local business elite
and health professionals do support theories of the local economic and
government-centred interests, but growing involvement of residents in
Vancouver and other urban areas in the 1950s through the 1960s and the
timing of the provincial government response show that more was
involved.

The Delayed Action of the Provincial Government

Speaking on the topic of air pollution at a Union of British
Columbia Municipalities conference in September 1960, Social Credit
municipal affairs minister Wesley Black indicated to the delegates that
relying on the honour system to counter the "careless and
indifferent habits of certain persons and groups" did not work.
(60) Pollution was a "highly technical subject," he said, and
the province was now studying approaches to air pollution control across
Canada. Minister Black's remarks are significant, because they are
an early Instance (the earliest I have found) of a Social Credit
politician speaking publicly about air pollution. The topic had expanded
from being an issue important to the public and some local
municipalities, to now also being a provincial political issue in the
1960s.

Unfortunately for those local government representatives in the
audience for Black's remarks who hoped for timely provincial policy
proposals, the municipal affairs ministry continued to indicate in 1963,
and then again in 1964, that the government was still studying the
issue. (61) As indicated above, through the mid- to later 1960s the
Social Credit administration in Victoria made policy proposals about air
pollution management, but failed, or perhaps did not fully intend, to
carry any of them through to implementation. (62) Perhaps the most
significant of these failed provincial initiatives was that of Health
Minister Ralph Loffmark, who released a set of emission and ambient air
standards in early 1969. Although originally intended to be enforceable,
province-wide regulations, the standards ultimately became simply
guidelines to be adopted, or not, by municipalities into their own
individual bylaws. Powerful Natural Resources Minister Ray Williston,
responsible for economic development and implementation of British
Columbia's Pollution Control Act, leaned heavily towards the
development portion of his mandate. He ensured that Loffmark's
initiative remained voluntary, and thus ineffective, by challenging the
legal basis for mandatory standards under the Health Act. Few
municipalities, with the clear exception only of the city of Vancouver,
had the resources or the experience to manage an effective air pollution
program. The pro-development Social Credit government showed a strong
tendency to leave the contradictory challenges of air pollution
management at the local government level and to issue uncoordinated and
confusing policy statements at their own governmental level.

Measured air emissions continued to decline in Vancouver in the
1960s. Vancouver's regulatory efforts were surely significant, but
the market shifts from solid fuels, such as coal and wood, to liquid
fuels, and of the wood industry from False Creek to Fraser River
locations, most likely had a larger effect. (63) However, even with
these air-quality improvements pockets of visible pollution kept
springing up. The eye-watering and throat-irritating effects of
ground-level ozone--not measured at the time--were likely increasing as
well, since car traffic continued to rise. (64) The APCS and the major
Vancouver newspapers kept up a drumbeat of reporting and advocacy on air
pollution. But as of the late 1960s there was still no clear provincial
policy direction to local governments on air pollution control.
Vancouver had its 1955 by-law controlling air emissions from most
sources, while Richmond, Port Moody, Burnaby, New Westminster, and North
Vancouver City and District also had by-laws, but limited or no
enforcement staff. (65)

For those municipalities in the Lower Mainland in the latter 1960s
that were implementing air pollution by-laws, smoke from slash-burning
operations in surrounding forestry lands on the North Shore mountains,
around Howe Sound and in the Fraser Valley, was particularly galling.
Efforts to control smoke from small sources, including a backyard
residential burning ban in Vancouver dating from 1965, were overwhelmed
by forestry smoke when the wind was blowing towards urban areas. Even a
forest-industry-association spokesman termed the slash-burning as an
annual "festival of autumn madness." (66)

Bulk-product-loading industries associated with the Port of
Vancouver also caused major problems for the municipalities and
residents around Burrard Inlet. Although dustfall continued to decrease
on average in the Lower Mainland through the 1960s as the use of coal
and beehive burners diminished to negligible levels, bulk commodity
loading dust countered these trends to some extent. Canada's major
wheat exports to China, beginning in 1962, ensured increasing quantities
of grain transported out of Vancouver's port. The area around the
Alberta Wheat Pool terminal in Vancouver was particularly subject to
repeated complaints from residents. Park commissioners complained of
dust sitting like a cloud above the neighbouring New Brighton Park. (67)
North Vancouver was the scene of major public protests and city council
interventions against a proposed expansion of the bulk products Neptune
Terminals. In the end, technical anti-pollution controls satisfied the
BC Research Council, newspaper editorialists, and enough council members
that loading dust could be controlled in surrounding areas of North
Vancouver. (68)

The Loffmark-Williston organizational authority struggle and the
air quality events particularly associated with bulk loading and
forestry burns around the Lower Mainland coincided with the rise of the
modern environmental movement in British Columbia. Concern about natural
resource use, water quality, and, as this history has shown, air
quality, had preceded this new movement by decades. However, different
in the late 1960s was the dramatic increase in the intensity and scope
of environmental concerns. Doubts became worries, especially regarding
new or newly discovered dangers to ecosystems and human health, the
deteriorating interconnections between natural and human systems, and
the existential meanings attached to these dangers.

Stories and editorials about air quality in Vancouver newspapers
multiplied in the late 1960s. (69) Expert discussion continued about the
impacts of monitored pollutants such as smoke, particulates, dustfall,
and sulphur dioxide, but there were now apprehensions about pollutants
released in significant amounts by motor vehicles, such as carbon
monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons. Smog took on the more
precise definition that scientists in California had given it as
resulting mainly from these vehicle emissions. (70) Starting from 1968,
public references to pollutants expanded to frequently include
relatively new toxic substances and dangers such as asbestos, lead, DDT,
nuclear radiation, and the global warming effects of carbon dioxide.
None of these substances, except potentially lead, which the federal
government started to phase out of gasoline in the 1970s, involved
widespread or immediate exposure dangers for people in the Lower
Mainland. Although air pollution experts in Vancouver had visited,
invited speakers, and drawn lessons from other jurisdictions for
decades, now local environmental concerns were more generally
cross-referenced with distant and broader problems. Newspapers published
emotionally charged images such as the biotic death of Lake Erie,
children wearing gas masks in Tokyo, and scary estimates for rising sea
levels as the result of carbon-induced global warming.

The nature of the discussion about pollutants also changed.
Although the debate about the aesthetic versus health impacts of air
pollution continued, now public discourse on pollution increasingly
included concerns about global population increase, food shortages,
natural resource depletion, and nuclear holocaust. (71) And the content
was often vivid, excitable, and apocalyptic. For example, Michael Shaw,
dean of agriculture at the University of British Columbia, told the
Vancouver Institute in November 1968 that human activity was threatening
photosynthesis. With "mankind running out of space and time,"
he said, "our future is in the hands of botanists and
ecologlsts." (72) A Province editorial put it that "mankind
was busily destroying [the planet] with all of the mindless complacency
of an idiot child let loose in the Louvre with a pair of scissors."
(73) Robin Hargen of the University of British Columbia warned of
irreversible pollution potentially crossing life system thresholds,
creating a "game over" scenario. (74) Vancouver radio station
CKNW ran a newspaper ad that appealed for the pubic to write to Premier
Bennett with the preface: "Pollution's a grave problem.
It's killing us all. In the span of our lifetime, if not sooner,
the human race will poison and choke itself to death--unless we stop
polluting our environment now." (75)

The environmental movement in British Columbia also introduced new
organizations and revitalized older ones, such as the Sierra Club and
the BC Wildlife Federation. The most significant new civic
anti-pollution organization was the Society for Pollution and
Environmental Control, commonly known as SPEC, formed in January 1969. A
predecessor was the Vancouver Air Pollution Control Society, discussed
in previous sections. But APCS, composed of local businessmen and
upper-income professionals in technical fields, was floundering in the
late 1960s as funding declined from the City of Vancouver and perhaps
because of its narrow mandate to promote air quality education and a
regional approach to air pollution management. (76) SPEC, initiated at
Simon Fraser University during a period of intense intellectual and
counter-culture fervour, was dominated initially by academics and
students. But its geographic and compositional scope expanded rapidly.
By November 1969 it covered most of British Columbia with eight regional
groups. Derrick Mallard, president of SPEC, noted in mid-1970, using the
language of the time, "Surprisingly, housewives are our most active
group. They're becoming more militant than the students." (77)
SPEC'S mandate covered air, water, and land pollution, as well as
resource use. SPEC took direct action by organizing rallies against
emissions from the Lower Mainland's oil refineries; monitoring air
quality in Port Moody and at a lead-emitting metal processing plant in
Richmond; taking water quality samples in Burrard Inlet and the lower
Fraser River; organizing and participating in public meetings; fighting
for access to environmental monitoring data; and submitting evidence to
government committees and enquiries. (78) SPEC also aligned with labour
groups, many of which supported the environmental movement, particularly
its clean water and air components. (79)

The city of Vancouver easily absorbed this greatly increased
environmental concern about air quality. But the city had attempted to
stimulate greater public response to poor quality since the early 1950s
in its hopes for a regional municipal or provincial approach to air
pollution. Vancouver officials took pride in developing and running
their own air pollution program. A fundamental source of satisfaction
continued to be the improvement in air quality, at least as measured by
city monitoring stations, through the 1960s. Average dustfall in 1968 of
8.3 tons per square mile per month had fallen steadily from a level of
12.2 tons in 1963. The soiling index, measuring smoke and particulates
in the air, showed an even greater improvement: in 1968 there were only
188 hours of bad air quality by this measure, compared to 956 hours in
1963. (80) The staff of four, supported by other city personnel, also
provided analytical and inspection services to the surrounding
municipalities that had air pollution by-laws but had no air pollution
staff.

But despite the measured improvement in air quality and the
confidence of Vancouver's smoke inspectors and politicians in their
dealings with industry, they fielded a steady stream of complaints from
residents and the press about air quality. The 1955 air pollution
control by-law did not apply to metal foundries or to commercial garbage
incineration. It lacked appropriate language to deal with grain
elevators. Asked by council to address these and other shortcomings with
a revised by-law, Vancouver air pollution staff consulted with air
pollution authorities from other Canadian and US cities and the
provincial and federal governments. (81) The new draft was passed into
law in May 1969 after extensive industry and business consultation. The
only major concession made by Vancouver to industry requests was to
delay compliance to new requirements on grain elevators and foundries
until 1 June 1971 and the requirement for cleaner multi-chamber burners
for apartment and commercial business incinerators until 1 June 1970.
(82)

However, the newly formed regional municipal government, the
Greater Vancouver Regional District, was not ready to take on air
pollution control. At a November 1968 meeting its board of directors
agreed to undertake governmental functions that involved regional
cooperation or joint administration, such as parks, water, sewerage and
draining, and planning, but hedged about whether air pollution
management should be "regional, provincial or even federal."
More information was sought, particularly, it seemed, to find out if the
province would take on the responsibility. (83) The consistent municipal
preference throughout this history was for province-wide pollution
control standards.

The environmental movement in British Columbia in the late 1960s
presented a serious challenge to the province's management of
pollution. Likely the overwhelming and sudden increase in public and
expert anxieties about air pollution and the environment, merging into
generalized fears of decline and death, seriously alarmed the Social
Credit government. Previous limits in the debate about air quality and
environmental wellbeing had been breached. Many now questioned the
fundamental economic rationale and modernization drive that underpinned
the government ideology. Social Credit politicians expressed their own
anxieties and lack of depth in the new terms of the debate, making
frequent accusations of emotionalism and hysteria about air pollution
and the environment. (84) Perhaps the clearest indication of the
governing fears was Bennett's assertion that the first priority in
the campaign for the August 1969 provincial election would be
"environmental or pollution control." (85) This was a
surprising change in direction for a government devoted to exploiting
natural resources, which had failed to act on air pollution for decades,
and supported the laissez-faire approach to environmental controversies.
The choice of priority, even if not fully reflected in later campaign
rhetoric, can be explained as a legitimation response by a government
frightened by the heightened environmental activism of the late 1960s.

In late August 1969, to prepare the ground for this election
priority and fill a policy hole, Resource Minister Williston announced
the first province-wide policy on air pollution: new and existing
industrial operations would require air emission permits from the
Pollution Control Branch by 1 January 1971 and 1972 respectively. (86)
However, after the Social Credit party won the election, Williston soon
lowered expectations for his air pollution program. He told a
construction association meeting that high costs and lack of capital and
technology made "perfect" pollution control difficult.
Williston also suggested to his audience that there would be a trade-off
between pollution and social expenditures, giving his view that the
health impacts of air pollution were difficult to prove. (87)

Public hearings to set air and water emission standards for
different Industrial sectors began in 1970. The Provincial Pollution
Control Branch tightly scripted these meetings to prioritize the input
of industry, government, and engineering experts on pollution
technology. By mid-1972, numerical emission levels had been finalized
for the forestry sector. These objectives were to act as guidelines to
the director in issuing operating permits, but they were couched in very
general terms. For example, to achieve the highest objectives,
"Ultimately, it is recommended that, where feasible within the
limits of available technology, all existing discharges be upgraded by
means of planned stage improvement to Level A." (88) Although
industrial groups complained that unproductive costs could be added to
their operations, most commentators noted that the guidelines were weak.
(89)

In late October 1969, a few days after Williston's
construction association speech that lowered expectations for the
province's environmental approach, the Greater Vancouver Regional
District announced that it would take on air pollution control as a
regional responsibility. It noted that the provincial government had
little funding, few staff, and inadequate policies on air pollution
control. (90) Vancouver's 1969 by-law provided the template for a
GVRD draft by-law, and Vancouver's air quality personnel formed the
core of the new GVRD staffing. Once a costing study was complete, the
GVRD formally asked for letters patent from the provincial government in
early 1971 to exercise this regional function, which was granted for all
air pollution sources in the district, including industry, in March
1972. (91) This inconsistency in the province's management of air
pollution likely resulted from fears that the highly motivated federal
minister In charge of the environment, Jack Davis, would intervene in
British Columbia with federal rules if it took no action. With the GVRD
taking over Vancouver's responsibility for air management, the
province could now counter federal threats to Intervene.

Conclusion

This article has taken a critical theory approach that posits the
state as being embedded in contradictory capitalist/revenue and
democratic/legitimation relationships. In the early social history of
air pollution in Vancouver, a segment of capitalist
interests--location-constrained businesses with low air
emissions--promoted air quality against the resistance of large
industrial corporations exporting beyond the bounds of Vancouver. But
the city of Vancouver and associated public health professionals were
also instrumental in implementing air pollution by-laws and seeking
public support for wider regional and provincial control of air
pollution. This work was made easier with business interests divided, a
market shift to cleaner fuels, industrial production diminishing in
importance relative to the service sector, and growing public support.
However, the provincial government, closer in outlook to large
resource-based industry than to its counterparts that were bound to the
local market, did not put air pollution on its policy agenda until the
1960s. When it did become a formal political issue, the development of
air pollution policy was Initially uncoordinated, and authority for
legal control was kept at the local government level, where it proved to
be almost completely ineffectual, with the key exception of Vancouver.

The city of Vancouver had financial motives behind its aggressive
stance on combatting local air pollution, but it was also concerned with
the well-being of the public. Meanwhile city residents, citizen
organizations, and environmental groups legitimized the stimulus to
action. This collective activism best explains the timing of provincial
initiatives on air pollution. The emergence of air pollution as an
political issue at the provincial level in the early 1960s and the
introduction of the first significant province-wide regulations in the
early 1970s were the result of major public protests. It is hard to make
the case, as Gonzalez does for American subnational jurisdictions, that
the advocacy of location-bound industries in Vancouver was the prime
driver for achieving wider geographic control over pollution. The story
of mid-century air pollution control in Vancouver involves complex
interactions among divided capitalist interests, differing priorities at
the municipal and provincial levels, and finally, demonstrations of a
unified public interest in clean air.

(2) A short history is provided in Chas. T. Hamilton, A Synoptic
History of the Air Pollution Control Society, Vancouver, BC (n.d.),
folder 2, box 146-A-4, Air Pollution Control Society, City of Vancouver
Archives (hereafter CVA). The APCS was known as the Kleneair Society for
its first few years.

(3) A telling comparison made by 1920s Mayor C.E. Tisdall is noted
in Eric Nicol's history of Vancouver. Tisdall is paraphrased as
saying that air quality was worse in Vancouver than in his boyhood home
in "Black Country" England. Nevertheless, Nicol characterizes
that situation as "merely a continuing nuisance" to Vancouver.
Eric Nicol, Vancouver (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1970), 151.

(4) Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Powers of Theory:
Capitalism, the State, and Democracy (London: Cambridge University
Press), 6.

(5) George A. Gonzalez, The Politics of Air Pollution: Urban
Growth, Ecological Modernizations, and Symbolic Inclusion (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2005): Owen Temby, "Environmental
Nuisances and Political Contestation in Canadian Cities: Research on the
Regulation of Urban Growth's Unwanted Outcomes," Urban History
Review 44, no. 1-2 (Spring 2016): 5-9.

(17) This article makes full use of thousands of articles on air
pollution in the Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, and Victoria
Colonist in the 1950s and especially the 1960s. The continuous coverage
and editorializing about this issue are important both as a historical
record and as an indication of the public significance of the concerns.
This record is also crucial, since I could find very little provincial
archival documentation of air pollution management, the British Columbia
Ministry of Natural Resources management of the Pollution Control Board,
and its key minister throughout my study period, Ray Williston.

(19) David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives:
Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Also see Joel A.
Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical
Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996).

(23) For example, in 1953 a Vancouver alderman indicated his view
that smoke and soot would be permanent conditions in the city if
residents wanted to keep their industries: '"Smog Is Here to
Stay' Declares Aid. Shawler," Vancouver Province, 12 November
1953, reel 396, UVMC. The New Westminster smoke inspector was quoted in
1959: "Whether we like it or not, there's always going to be a
certain amount of smoke in New Westminster. There's not much hope
of it lessening unless industry starts moving away." "Smoke
Nuisance to Remain," Vancouver Province, 19 October 1959, reel 514,
UVMC.

(25) A short history is provided in Chas. T. Hamilton, A Synoptic
History of the Air Pollution Control Society, Vancouver (n.d.), folder
2, box 146-A-4, Air Pollution Control Society, CVA. The APCS was known
as the Kleneair Society for its first few years.

(26) See Jeffrey A. Charles, Service Clubs in American Society:
Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

(32) For two examples, see "A Menace We Can Handle
Ourselves"; and "But We Can't Stop Breathing,"
Vancouver Province, 15 September 1958, reel 574, UVMC. The editorials
frequently quote health professionals on the public's sensitivity
to water pollution, but its seeming indifference to air pollution.

(33) For Los Angeles, see Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly,
Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles
(Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2008), 28-9; for St. Louis, see Tarr, Search
for the Ultimate Sink, 257: for Toronto, see Temby, "Trouble in
Smogville," 679-80.

(59) See Lee Thiessen, "Protesting Smoke: A Social and
Political History of Vancouver Air Pollution," MA thesis,
University of Victoria, 2017, 51-80,
https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/8456/Thiessen_Lee_
MA_2017.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y0.

(62) For an account of these policy forays, see Thiessen,
"Protesting Smoke."

(63) The relative contributions to improved air quality of these
fuel shifts, industry relocation, and regulatory efforts have not been
explored in any literature. For a history of the industrial shift from
False Creek, see Jacopo Miro, "Visions of False Creek: Urban
Development and Industrial Decline in Vancouver, 1960-1980," MA
thesis, University of Victoria, 2011, https://
dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/3513/Miro_Jacopo_MA_2011.
pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

(67) "Residents Back Park Dust Fight," Vancouver Sun, 4
May 1967, reel 570, UVMC. An Alberta Wheat Pool representative remarked
to a newspaper reporter, "If they put a park where it is surrounded
by an asbestos plant, the railroad and grain elevators ... they can
expect nothing but air pollution problems." "Grain Men
Act," Vancouver Sun, 26 June 1967, reel 573, UVMC. New Brighton
Park, in fact, is the oldest in Vancouver, dating from the 1860s,
contemporary with the establishment of the old Hastings sawmill, but
predating all other industry. See Walter G. Hardwick, Vancouver (Don
Mills, ON: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1974), 8-10.

(69) One crude measure of this increased coverage is a greater than
five-fold increase in the number of articles in the Sun and Province
combined comparing 1969 to 1964.

(70) For a history of California's air pollution and policies,
see James E. Krier and Edmund Ursin, Pollution and Policy: A Case Essay
on California and Federal Experience with Motor Vehicle Air Pollution
1940-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

(71) For a description of the aesthetic versus health framing of
the air-quality problem in Vancouver and its implications for regulatory
stringency, see Thiessen, "Protesting Smoke," 50-78.